Copies
Quantum physicists will tell you that there is fundamentally no difference between the real and digital worlds, and of course they are probably correct, but there is a difference between What We Know and How We Live. When we are online, it *feels* different to how it feels to...
Bowie…
I remember the interview Jeremy Paxman did with David Bowie in 1999. I was deep into the web at the moment and was constantly trying to convince people that it was very definitely the start of a revolution and not just ‘the 1990s version of CB radio’… Partial transcriptions...
Always Connected. Always Alone.
When thinking about metamodernism – what it is, how one recognises it – I wrote down some notes on modernism and postmodernism. Along with thinking of the time spans and a few cultural influences, I wanted to come up with a pithy sentence on each of the eras. This...
The Porous Border Between Two Worlds
The early days of the World Wide Web ushered in the era of Cyber Utopianism, a belief that the Web would “boost democratic participation, trigger a renaissance in moribund communities [and] strengthen associational life.” (Morozov, 2011) The act of living a Cyber Utopian life required an existential, Sartrean separation...
Filtered
“Is this disconnect from our bodies the way we should be living? This flesh now feels like it is just another thing I have to take care of, like a plant. I just live in my mind now, but I feel like I’m somehow incomplete, artificial, a kind of...
Tutorial 26 Jan 2022
Tutorial with Jonathan 26 Jan I’ve been sucking in a lot of ideas from everywhere in the hope that I stumble upon the keystone to support the whole complicated edifice I’ve constructed. As it is I’m holding up four walls of a vault and don’t feel like I can...
Laurie Anderson- Norton Lectures
I first heard Laurian Anderson’s album Big Science in about 1983 and have been hooked to her ever since. Her storytelling is very important…...
The Screen Media Reader
The Screen Media Reader edited by Stephen Monteiro (Goodreads) -pg. 1 Screens are in our hand or close by for all manner of everyday activity, shaping and reshaping what we do and how we do it. Over the course of a day we may have more face-to-face encounters with...
Timotheus Vermeulen
Timotheus Vermeulen is a professor of media, culture and society at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is the co-founder of the now defunct webzine Notes on Metamodernism and a regular contributor to frieze. His research and teaching are primarily in the disciplines of ‘screen studies’ and ‘critical and...
The System Of Objects
The System of Objects by Jean Baudrillard (Goodreads). This bit really jumped out at me. When Baudrillard wrote this- published in 1968 – he was obviously not aware of how the web would change how people conceptualise themselves and other people. We DO now feel like we are able...
Social Warming
Social Warming by Charles Arthur (Goodreads)...
Cultish
Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell (Goodreads)...
Lossy Compression
We are in this feedback loop, we condense our life into a trite tweet or a ‘pretty’ picture while constantly searching for ‘likes’ and ‘friends’ and ‘followers’. If we post about #Red and it gets more interaction than if we post about #Blue, we’ll end up posting more about...
Zeros and Ones
This blew my mind when I first read it in the late 90s. It still blows my mind now....
Dante’s Divine Comedy
A free Yale course, 24 lectures on Dante’s Divine Comedy… I am slowly going through this course. I decided to start watching these lectures because the Divine Comedy came up again in something I read and then I saw a link to this course on Twitter. There are no...
Christmas break
I’m continuing to avoid doing anything for my MA…. which isn’t great… Instead, I’ve been reading (currently ‘Remainder’ by Tom McCarthy) and learning how to darn socks. If you were given cashmere socks for Christmas, you should learn how to darn socks, too, cos those things will have holes...